The ghosts of forgotten histories haunt America’s heartland, begging to be remembered and exorcised. George Floyd’s Minneapolis, as we have lately come to understand, has never been a harmless Midwestern town of grains and lakes. The enslaved Dred Scott’s eighteen-thirties sojourn at Fort Snelling (now part of the Twin Cities) and his subsequent return downriver to Missouri gave rise to the nation’s most notorious Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that Black Americans—slave or free—had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Floyd, who died choking on that assertion, was from North Carolina by way of Houston, and the string of memorials following his death sent a mourning cry out of Minnesota back along Dred Scott’s path, downriver to the South before turning east toward the Atlantic and the distant memory of Africa.
In 1811, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, anticipating the movements of Scott and Floyd, departed the Ohio Country and journeyed two thousand miles across the South, seeking to recruit tribes to a Native confederacy able to withstand the land hunger of the United States. The stakes could not have been higher: Tecumseh’s effort marked the last time Native peoples would be able to mobilize in concert with a formidable European military. His British allies—advancing their own geopolitics, to be sure—thought such a confederacy might buttress an Indian state, which, in turn, could serve as a barrier to American expansion. Today, one mountain, a few statues, eight towns, and several streets and schools bear Tecumseh’s name; a small collection of myths and fictions tell some version of his story. What he had hoped would be an Indian state, a consolidation of Native power, is now what Americans call the Midwest. And Tecumseh, his alliance, and his war linger only as a trace memory.
To resurrect his story is to recognize that the United States confronts not a singular “original sin” of slavery, threaded through centuries of systemic racism and extending to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, but two foundational sins, intimately entangled across geographies stretching from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta. The Shawnee homelands were the first epic battleground in the United States’ acquisition of new territory, a process characterized by the violent plunder of Native land and its conversion into vast American wealth. After Kentucky militiamen killed him in battle, in 1813, Tecumseh and his dead comrades became fetishes of conquest in the most literal sense (the white men carried off Native belongings and carved long swaths of skin from Indian bodies to make souvenir razor strops), even as the forceful taking of the land came to seem like a lesser sin, a regrettable but necessary wrong justified by the expectation of American goodness.
As Peter Cozzens points out in a new joint biography, “Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation” (Knopf), Tecumseh’s geopolitical vision was unrealizable without the revitalizing religion preached by his younger brother, Tenskwatawa, a seer and spiritual leader. Between them, the brothers offered a full range of Native social critique—about Indian land loss, cultural degradation, infighting, and spiritual decay—while advocating a program of action aimed at the future. It was not enough to unite against the Americans on the battlefield. Such unity required, Cozzens suggests, “moral cleansing and spiritual rebirth,” personal transformations and fierce resistances that together were meant to create a new and better Indian world.
The Native homeland that Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa fought to protect—the Americans called it the Northwest Territory—encompassed five future U.S. states and the most pressing issues facing the new republic. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Confederation Congress, tried to address those challenges. It prohibited the extension of slavery into the new territories while introducing a fugitive-slave provision that protected Southern property rights in human beings. It outlined an orderly structure through which undisciplined westward colonies could fully join the American empire. It assumed that the land would inevitably become part of the United States, but hypocritically promised to treat American Indian people with “utmost good faith.”
As with so many American laws, it also prompts us to follow the money. The ordinance mapped out an American territorial expansion based on white mobility and demographic growth: if a colonial territory had sixty thousand free inhabitants, it could petition for statehood. In the meantime, the territory would be rationalized through a grid system set forth by the Land Ordinance of 1785. The six-square-mile township and the rectilinear forms of counties and crossroads make up its visible legacy. The laws prescribed a national expansion based on yeoman farmsteads knit into an orderly fabric of small towns and local schools. But the grid also made land into an abstraction, and thus a commodity ripe for speculation. It was an opportunity grasped by many of the nation’s first leaders. George Washington is today remembered as both a President and a slaveholder, an embodiment of foundational American contradictions. He should also be remembered as one of the most aggressive landowners in the early republic, holding title, at the time of his death, to more than fifty thousand acres across several states. In that respect, he exemplified the connection between American national expansion and trade in land: the U.S. planned to pay off its Revolutionary War debt with land sales in the Northwest, positioning itself as a real-estate speculator with continental ambitions.
But the United States didn’t own most of the lands it hoped to flip. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, England recognized American sovereignty west to the Mississippi, betraying the Native allies who had supported it in the conflict. This “sovereignty,” though, meant nothing to the Miami, the Shawnee, the Potawatomi, and other tribes whose territory it was. Encroaching settlers had no respect for Indian ownership and weren’t willing to wait on American surveyors to parcel and sell the land. They squatted where they wished, building frontier stations and clearing land, all the while killing Indians and being killed by them in return.
This was the world in which the Shawnee brothers grew up. When Tecumseh was six and Tenskwatawa was still in his mother’s womb, their father died in a 1774 battle with Virginia militiamen. Their older brother Cheeseekau raised them to be uncompromising in their resistance to the Americans. At the age of fifteen, Tecumseh distinguished himself during a raid on American flatboats on the Ohio River. He possessed from the start a remarkable warrior charisma. An American officer later recalled him as “one of the finest looking men I ever saw—about six feet high, straight, with large, fine features.” But Tecumseh carried scars, both physical and emotional. At the age of twenty, while on a raid, he shattered a thighbone and acquired a permanent limp. Four years later, Americans killed Cheeseekau in a fight in Tennessee, and two years after that he watched another brother die at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
For a decade, Tecumseh sought to live a Native life in the deepening shadow of colonial advance, marrying twice and fathering a son. By 1810, though, he had seen enough settlements and treaties to have developed not only a sense of urgency but also a strategic vision unmatched among his peers. At a parley, he rose to call out the territorial governor William Henry Harrison: “Since the peace was made [in 1795], you have killed some of the Shawnees, Winnebagoes, Delawares, and Miamis, and you have taken our lands from us, and I do not see how we can remain at peace if you continue to do so.”
Tecumseh recognized that colonization followed a pattern that led to war: American interlopers ignored Indian territorial rights and their own government’s treaty agreements. They intruded on Indian land, bringing with them violence and a racialized hatred for Native people forged through generations of colonial conflict. Unable to handle Native self-defense, settlers called for help from the federal government, which sent troops and mobilized militias. Military victories produced treaties of land cession or sale, which then justified the existing settlements and pushed the boundaries farther to the west. Rapacious migrants ignored the new boundary lines and started the cycle once again.
The Shawnee brothers followed a long line of Native people of the Northwest who fought to defend their homelands from American invasion. Indians killed as many as fifteen hundred whites during Little Turtle’s War, a conflict that ran for a decade after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, ending only in 1794, with the defeat of Native warriors at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Those fifteen hundred deaths were a drop in the bucket compared with the influx of new settlers. In the first half of 1788 alone, the military leader Josiah Harmar reported, more than six thousand settlers passed into the Ohio Country. In 1790 and 1791, supported by state militias, the first American national troops invaded Native settlements there, seeking to punish Indian resisters and force them to relinquish their lands.
Indian people had already developed successful tribal alliances. In 1763, a loose confederation of tribes under the leadership of Pontiac fought the British to a stalemate after the Seven Years’ War. When Harmar marched his shiny new American Army into the Ohio Country in 1790, Little Turtle’s Western Confederacy routed his forces. Arthur St. Clair tried again the following year, and the results were even worse, with more than six hundred of his command dead and a high percentage wounded. After the defeats, George Washington tripled the size of the Army and committed five-sixths of the federal budget to subduing the Western Indians. Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers was made possible because the Americans, out of necessity, threw everything they had at the Indian alliance.
Wayne’s victory set the stage for the efforts of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa to unite an even larger confederacy. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville carved a line across the Ohio lands, reducing Indian territory to the northwest corner of the region. Ohio quickly filled up with sixty thousand free people, and in 1803 it became the seventeenth state (after the thirteen original colonies and Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee). Between 1803 and 1809, the U.S. negotiated fifteen land-cession treaties—some of which its own representatives characterized as farce—relying on handpicked Indian signatories and pushing tribes to sell land that did not belong to them. The land entered the public domain and was then grabbed up by speculators, settlers, and companies as newly privatized property. The wealth of the nation, Americans have grudgingly recognized, was produced through the labor of brutally enslaved people. But that wealth also rested upon formal systems—colonial, military, and fiscal—that alchemized the lands of an Indian continent into American property and money.
Tecumseh vehemently rejected the Ohio treaties and insisted that any Indian land cessions had to be made collectively by all Native peoples. When Harrison threatened him with the unified power of the states—the “Seventeen Fires”—Tecumseh said that he planned to respond in kind, creating “a strict union amongst all the fires” of a strong Native alliance. The only way to check the evil of American encroachment, he said, was “for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided but belongs to all for the use of each.” If the U.S. imagined itself as an irresistible force, the brothers sought to create an immovable indigenous object, rallying and organizing an Indian military response that carried with it the further possibility of a confederated Indian nation.
